It seems to me that, for every generation, exponential leaps in hardware capabilities, speed and power requirements are needed for only incremental improvements in visual quality. (Meanwhile, what game engine coders should REALLY be focussing on imho, physics, AI and fuller interaction with objects in the game world, are progressing at a snail's pace, but that's a topic for another thread.) At some point, the requirements for going to the next step in image quality will be so great that we'll effectively hit a plateau.
I think graphics card manufacturers should've been focussing on making their chips more affordable (ie. higher yields and easier to mass-produce) and lower in power requirements rather than ever so slightly faster than their previous chips. Sure, Crysis looks magnificent, but, for me, Far Cry looked good enough! Imagine if, instead of creating the new DX10 beasts, one of the graphics card companies had focussed all their R&D into making Far Cry playable on passively-cooled on-board video by now! Their competitor might've gotten the high-end laurels, but the company that did that would've cleaned out at the integrated circuits end of the market, which is where the greatest sales are and where Intel is currently making a killing! Financially, which company would've been better off if they had achieved that?
OK, I realise this is far too utopic of me, and that marketing will always demand that a chipmaker dominate the high end of the market, because where the hardcore go, the mid-range masses follow, so nobody will put that much effort into achieving what I was talking about. But I can't help but think that more powerful chips are just gonna encourage games devs to be lazier in their coding and to spend less effort optimising bad console ports for PC hardware, just as they've always done, rather than using all the extra power in these chips intelligently to create better-looking games.
This doesn't apply to the good developers and to the creators of game engines, of course, who will squeeze every drop of power out of these new chips, but, as I said above, how much more impressed can we get with graphics? What I;'m looking forward to most in Crysis to be honest isn't the lush new foilage, but the fully-destructible environments, which I feel will make a greater difference to the gameplay. Similarly, what impressed me most with the Source engine wasn't the graphics themselves, but the amazingly-realistic lip-syncing, which added to the immersiveness and atmosphere of the game more for me.
OK, maybe I'm a little off-topic, since the people posting in this thread probably DO care primarily about the graphics, but I felt I had to add my opinion.
but was also fun to watch peopel get so wound up.
